Investigating social cognition with real people and with images of people - Vendredi 15 juin 10h , Salle C203

Experimental research in the field of social cognition has been largely relying on measuring participants’ responses to images picturing socially relevant stimuli and events. This method has offered a precise control over the contents of the stimuli and, as a result, this research has been invaluable in increasing our knowledge about the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in processing of social information. However, at the same time, important aspects of natural social encounters have been absent in these studies. While the visual input from a face, for example, can be relatively similar independent of whether it originates from a face of a person who is physically present or from an image of her face, crucial differences nevertheless exist. Most importantly, the perceiver knows that the person in the image cannot see him/her, will not react anyhow to his/her behavior, and there cannot be any interaction between him/her and the pictured person. In this talk, I will describe recent research which has started to compare different types of responses to real and pictorial social stimuli and I will provide examples of studies showing great differences in the observed results.

Affective eye contact - Jeudi 21 juin 15h, Salle C203

In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals’ direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. Considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. In this talk, I will describe research concerning the effects of others’ gaze direction on observers’ affective responses. I will focus on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers’ affects have been controlled. Two important themes emerge. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another’s direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction.

Social exclusion is a common phenomenon that threatens the fundamental human need to belong. It can lead to depression, alienation, and sometimes even to violent behavior. A line of research suggests that exclusion can also modulate processing of social information. For instance, exclusion has been shown to improve participants’ identification of others’ facial expressions and bias their attention toward smiling faces. In this talk, I will review research on the effects of exclusion on processing of social information. The current evidence suggests that exclusion not only influences memory performance and alters high-level judgments that individuals make, but also exerts biases at the earlier, perceptual stages, modulating stimulus detection and identification. Understanding how these biases emerge in socially excluded individuals might help researchers better understand why exclusion sometimes leads to detrimental outcomes, and why some individuals are able to respond to exclusion adaptively and restore their sense of belonging.